Discourse varies widely with age, level of education, and psychiatric state. Word graphs have been recently shown to provide behavioral markers of formal thought disorders in psychosis (e.g., disorganized flow of ideas) and to track literacy acquisition in children with typical development. Here we report that a graph-theoretical computational analysis of verbal reports from subjects spanning 6 decades of age and 2 decades of education reveals asymptotic changes over time that depend more on education than age. In typical subjects, short-range recurrence and lexical diversity stabilize after elementary school, whereas graph size and long-range recurrence only steady after high school. Short-range recurrence decreases towards random levels, while lexical diversity, long-range recurrence, and graph size increase away from near-randomness towards a plateau in educated adults. Subjects with psychosis do not show similar dynamics, presenting at adulthood a children-like discourse structure. Typical subjects increase the range of word recurrence over school years, but the same feature in subjects with psychosis resists education.

话语会因年龄，受教育程度和精神状态的不同而有很大差异。最近已经显示出单词图可以为精神病患者提供正式的思想障碍的行为标志（例如思想混乱），并可以追踪具有典型发育能力的儿童的识字能力。在这里，我们报告说，对来自6岁以上年龄和2年以上教育水平的受试者的口头报告进行图论计算分析，发现随着时间的推移，渐进性变化更多地取决于教育程度，而不是年龄。在典型的科目中，小学后短程复发和词汇多样性趋于稳定，而高中后图的大小和长程复发才稳定。短程复发率朝着随机水平降低，而词汇多样性，长程复发率，受过教育的成年人的图形大小从近乎随机的趋于平稳增长。患有精神病的受试者没有显示出类似的动态，在成年后呈现出像孩子一样的话语结构。典型的科目会增加整个学年单词复读的范围，但患有精神病的科目的相同特征会阻碍教育。